Now that we have a nice reflective water shader, It would be cool if Reflective parts could finally look reflective. We know the reflections are approximations, but it’s the look that counts.
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but… but… my poor computer…
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That’s what settings are for
Control will eventually have very, very detailed units, for the people who’s PC can handle it, and the old blocky units for those who can’t, because that’s the idea of settings, allow people with better equipment to have better quality, and those with less to have faster running speeds
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My units? 
Water reflections are almost fake - they are just a clever reprojection of what you see in your main camera. This sort of works for water because the water is mostly horizontal and really only reflects at very acute angles (clicky). Furthermore, wave distortion kinda hides the details, so it’s not immediately obvious where the reflection ends.
For parts, that’s going to look very strange, e.g. you look at the part up front, but you don’t see any reflections, because the incident rays originate from behind the view, i.e. not currently visible.
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This is definitely a feature that needs to be added. Current reflections just reflect the skybox and it looks atrocious and illogical. If we could get the same reflections that we see in the water, that would be wonderful.
Its been over 4 years and we still haven’t seen an update for reflections.
Example of water reflections:
Example of current reflections:
I’m inside, there are no clouds. This looks even worse when the moon comes out and you can see the moon in the reflection while indoors. Using dark parts makes it looks less terrible but it’s still pretty bad none the less.
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The thing is that water is using screen space reflections here. Try placing some water and looking straight at it and you will see through anything behind you. This is because it is a cheap way to fake reflections by copying anything already present on your screen and aligning it with the surface normals. It works perfectly for stuff like reflections on cars in racing games where the only things you need to reflect are the roads and walls, which are all already present on your screen.
What you are looking for are reflection probes. There are 2 variants, static and dynamic:
The static probes are just pre-baked skyboxes of an area surrounding the reflective object, thus no dynamic reflections.
Dynamic probes are extremely expensive. They are similar to the static ones by having a skybox, but instead of a static image, they use multiple real-time render ports (6, but some aren’t active if culled).
The main issue with reflection probes here is that they would have to be either applied like the current Texture instances so that they won’t reflect on useless faces, or entire materials, but that would cause a lot of performance issues.
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This is actually okay. A lot of materials only become reflective at shallow angles.
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I agree, I was talking more about the fact that he wanted a reflective smooth board (or whatever it is) that would reflect the interior instead of a skybox. There isn’t another way to achieve this without probes or a secondary render port.
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